Claudia Dreifus is a political journalist whose most recent
Ms. article, "Berlin Diaries," recounted
her trip to Germany to investigate the fate of family members
during the Holocaust. Her most recent book is Scientific
Conversations.

Women on Death Row
A Special Report by Claudia Dreifus

Filmmaker Micki Dickoff, above left,
was a childhood friend of Sunny Jacobs, right.
In 1990 Dickoff learned of Jacobs' plight and spent
two and a half years investigating and reporting
the truth that finally set Jacobs free. Photo by
Steve Goldstein for Ms.

Sonia Jacobs, 56, a tiny, pepper-haired
woman who makes her living as a yoga instructor, is
sitting with me in a Los Angeles luncheonette, ordering
breakfast.

"The cranberry, we don
t have any low-fat cranberry muffins," a waiter
informs us.

"Okay, fatty cranberries,"
smiles Jacobs, who likes to be called by her nickname,
"Sunny." " How fatty can a cranberry
be?"

Sunny Jacobs doesn't sweat the small
stuff. In 1976, when her son Eric was 9 and her daughter
Tina, 15 months old, she was convicted of killing
two police officers in Florida and sentenced to be
the first woman to die in the electric chair under
what was then a newly reinstated capital punishment
law.

She subsequently spent five years in isolation on
Florida's death row and a total of nearly 17 years
in a maximum security prison. Her children were taken
from her and her common law husband, Jesse Tafero,
convicted of the same murders, was put to death in
1990 in an electrocution so grizzly that his head
caught on fire.

Now, it is true that Sunny was present
at the crime, though in the most passive way. In February
of 1976, when she was 28 years old, she'd traveled
to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, from North Carolina where
she lived, to meet up with Tafero, Tina s father,
an ex-con who she'd fallen for. I didn't know about
his background when I met him, she maintains, while
picking on her cranberry muffin. "And then, once
we were together, it was, you know, love."

In Florida that day, an acquaintance
of Jesse's, a career-criminal named Walter Rhodes,
offered to drive Sunny, Jesse, and the children to
West Palm Beach, where Sunny hoped to pick up some
money wired there by her parents.

En route, they were stopped by two
police officers, who spotted a gun on the floorboard
by Rhodes's feet. Rhodes panicked and shot the officers.
Sunny, in the back, covering her children like a human
shield, didn't even see the killings. The murders,
she says, happened in a blink of an eye.
Almost immediately after their arrests, Rhodes cut
a deal with the prosecutor. In exchange for a lesser,
second-degree murder charge, he agreed to testify
that it was Jesse and Sunny who'd done the killing.
Though Rhodes would fail a lie detector test, and
while he was the only one of the trio who tested definitively
positive for firing a gun, the authorities committed
themselves to his scenario. They illegally kept from
the defense Walter Rhodes's polygraph report that
contradicted his trial testimony; in fact, the prosecutor
told the press that he gave Rhodes a deal because
the man had passed his polygraph.

Meanwhile, Sunny and Jesse were painted
in the media as a kind of "Bonnie and Clyde"
team, thrill-seekers who killed for the fun of it.

The States Currently 38 states
have death penalty laws on the books. One, Illinois,
has a moratorium on the practice, put in place
by former governor George Ryan. As governor of
Texas, President Bush led the nation in executions,
presiding over a total of 153.

Supreme Court
The Supreme Court in 1972 emptied all the death
rows in the country, declaring the death penalty
unconstitutional. States redrafted their laws,
and in 1976 it was reinstated. In June 2002, the
court found the sentencing of mentally retarded
persons to death unconstitutional. Also last summer,
the court ruled that the authority to impose the
death penalty lies solely with juries, not judges.
In January the court refused to review the constitutionality
of sentencing juvenile offenders to death. There
are currently more than 80 juvenile offenders
on death row, including one who was allowed to
represent himself in court when he was only 16
years old.

Federally In
2002 two federal trial judges each declared the
current federal dealth penalty unconstitutional.
One was reversed on appeal; the other is pending
appeal. Attorney General John Ascroft has ordered
federal prosceutors to seek the death penalty
in 28 cases where they had sought lesser sentences.

The International Arena
Over half the world's countries have
abolished the death penalty in law or practice
and many, including the European Union, refuse
to extradite prisoners to the US without a guarantee
that they will not be executed. The US consistently
refuses to sign UN agreements limiting the death
penalty. In February the World Court ordered the
US to stay the executions of 3 Mexican citizens.
Mexico charges that the prisoners, along with
48 others on US death row, were not given their
right to legal help from the Mexican government,
in violation of the Vienna Convention. At least
97 foreign citizens now await execution in the
United States. --Karen Rose